


johanna

by miss_belivet



Series: the wonder poison archive [1]
Category: Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Murder, Self-Harm, Suicide, compulsory heterosexuality, until mental illness and homophobia and world war one come for them, wholesome edwardian chemistry wives are happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 00:29:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11196675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_belivet/pseuds/miss_belivet
Summary: Before there could be Doctor Poison, there was Doctor Maru.





	johanna

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm supposed to be writing Wonder Poison smut, but I couldn't help myself after Elena Anaya's interview with The Verge about creating Isabel Maru as she's seen in the movie.
> 
> This was written in a handful of hours, so some facts may be out of order and I may clean it up someday.

They move whenever the neighbors discover that they are more than simply roommates or colleagues, carefully wrapping beakers and test tubes in last week's newspapers and packing them in the cardboard boxes that they never throw out anymore.

Isabel's hair is tied up and away from their work, as always, but _hers_ is an unbound sheaf of wheat against her back, getting caught in the tape and tangled around the buttons on her dress. Once, it was dipped into the acid Isabel was working with, causing a brief sizzle of panic until they found a pair of dusty sewing scissors and snipped the lock off. Pink lips pressed a smiling kiss on Isabel's mouth for her hectic heroism, and their work was forgotten for the entire afternoon once Isabel wrapped the newly jagged hair around her fingers and stole a second kiss.

The scent of hydrochloric acid still reminds Isabel of their striped bedsheets and her own, untainted voice singing Johanna's name over and over again.

_Johanna, Johanna._

After they publish their first collaborative work together, they celebrate by exchanging rings in the park beside their latest apartment in Munich. Isabel receives a ring of topaz and emerald, and Johanna is given one studded with fiery garnets. When the park clears out as the sun begins to set, they steal kisses in an empty, artificial grove and examine their rings beside one another in the dying light. A constable passes and warns them that the park isn't safe for a pair of sisters at night, and the shining happiness in Johanna's eyes dims until he has disappeared from view and Isabel produces a small cake from her satchel.

They spend the evening beneath an old yew tree, licking icing from their fingers and whispering the words that no church and no court will grant them.

_My wife, my Johanna._

The next time they are discovered, it is by a nosy landlord who conveniently mistakes their lovemaking for a burglary gone wrong, and they are thrown out into the streets. Johanna thought to grab their small jewelry box, their journal, and their purses as they were dragged out of the building, because when they return in the morning their clothes and their lab equipment have been reduced to shredded and shattered rabble in the alley. They don't bother to inquire after their furniture; from past experience, they know they will never see it again.

The hate in Isabel's heart for that wretched man and his nattering wife blinds her to the silence Johanna adopts for the next month as they sleep in the parlor belonging to one of their old professors. His partner is an artistic, bohemian man, and the clear pity on his face whenever Johanna dodges her touch is enough to drive Isabel mad.

They spend the summer in her father's old townhouse in Madrid as an attempt to clear the sallowness from Johanna's skin and the dullness from her eyes.

_Isn't this better, Johanna?_

Isabel grows accustomed to working alone. Her experiments take a turn from bolstering adrenaline and sealing wounds to melting skin and collapsing lungs. Without Johanna's keen sense of biology, the learning curve is steep and her hypotheses are crude. However, it only takes two months orchestrate the deaths of her lab rats according to plan. 

Johanna goes somewhere during the long, quiet days. Isabel isn't sure where, but the scent of cigarettes and cologne always wafts in on loose sheets of long, golden hair in the middle of the night. A bar, perhaps, or the concert hall several blocks away.

The ache of disappointment and loneliness doesn't stop her from wrapping an arm around a too-thin waist and sighing.

_Johanna, I missed you today._

Isabel comes home from the market one afternoon to find Johanna sitting on the bench in the hall, her knuckles white around the blue leather journal that holds the details of Isabel's recent work. She throws it at Isabel's feet, and a bottle of wine crashes on the tile floor, staining the pages a bloody red.

She braves Johanna's screaming with a grimace and a sickening twist in her gut, but the icy knife that slices her heart in two comes when a trunk appears, carried by a man that Isabel recognizes from the pharmacy down the street. He says something about roommates, and then a quiet _corazon_ , and the heartbreak transforms into shaking, biting hatred as they walk through the still-open door.

_Don't do this, Johanna._

She publishes her work independently—the first in years without _Doktor_   _Johanna Schröder_  stamped after _Doktor_   _Isabel Maru_ on the title page—to great criticism. _Unnecessary, unholy, unscientific._ She is branded a monster in academia for even imagining the compounds, and an investigation is opened regarding the methods she used to test her theories.

She didn't used to believe herself cruel or unforgiving, but the grainy, framed photo on her desk stares solemnly out at her from behind a plate of glass cracked open in a fit of rage. Isabel closes her eyes against it, but eventually she places it in a locked drawer. She cannot contain the festering wound in her soul; the blackened loathing and excruciating sting of betrayal are too much to contain in one person.

So she won't contain it.

A week later, she proves her critics right by testing the gas on herself. Her cheek blisters and melts into her gloved fingertips, and her shriek wrenches open the delicate skin covering her teeth and leaves them exposed to the poisoned air. Breathing is a mistake; her tongue burns and her esophagus feels as though it is being ripped from her throat. The sheer agony floating in the air around her is unlike anything she has ever experienced, and it is perfect.

She drops away from the yellow cloud, dripping blood across the mahogany floors as she drags herself down the stairs into the basement. She strips away her clothing and begins the process of cleansing herself and tending her wounds with shaking hands, using mixtures stolen out of Johanna's old notebooks to stay alive.

She passes out and hallucinates as she works. When she closes her eyes, pale hands that don't belong to her massage the cream onto her jaw, and the skin there doesn't fall away at so gentle a touch.

_Johanna..._

Göttingen. The library where they met. Hours spent talking about their courses together. Hours wasted. All six librarians die.

Berlin. The El Dorado, a club meant only for women like them. Like her. Where they first kissed. Out of the sixteen injured, five die.

Munich. The apartment where it all began to decay. Isabel spots their old settee through a window. The landlord and his three daughters die.

_I used to crave you instead, Johanna._

In Madrid, Isabel stares out of the window in the master bedroom of her father's house at the street below. She doesn't yet know if she will release the gas in the pharmacy; when she sees the gleam of yellow hair in the window, she decides she won't.

But it would seem Johanna saw her, too. Without any effort on Isabel's part, a damning  _snap_  echoes down the street later that evening, and Isabel remains at her perch as the pharmacist runs outside covered in blood that isn't his own. _Ayudame_. She wraps a hand in the drapes until she feels them rip and watches as the first responders load Johanna's corpse—the sheet misshapen and bloody over her head, but the hem of the blue satin chemise peeking out beneath unmistakable—into an automobile. 

Over the next week, she watches a handful of mourners come and go from the apartment above the pharmacy. When she goes to find Johanna's final resting place, it is a nondescript plot in the unconsecrated potter's field outside the city.

 _Catholics_ , she thinks hatefully in the empty cemetery and imagines razing Spain to the ground.

Johanna's mortal sin wasn't her suicide.

 _Johanna, Johanna_.

Half a year later, a few months after Germany declares war on France, a young man in a uniform appears at her door in Berlin with a telegram from a general.

She doesn't care one way or another about the war, but the offer of unlimited resources and test subjects waiting for her in the Ottoman Empire is intriguing.


End file.
